Waste is part of every industry operation and requires business commitment in lowering the impact on the environment. Vodafone Egypt is putting efforts to find opportunities for waste recycling and better management and working with local recycling businesses to better manage the waste from our operations.

The large amount of waste produced has a major detrimental effect on the environment as it contaminates water, soil, and air. Some methods of disposing these wastes are also unhealthy, producing significant green house gas emissions and contributing to climate change. This highlights the importance of recycling, which turns materials that would otherwise be waste into valuable resources, reducing energy usage and pollution.

Vodafone’s recycling measures involve handset recycling, battery recycling, and paper recycling. We are also supporting the establishment of a major recycling facility in Hurghada.

Vodafone Egypt launched a Handset Recycling Initiative in 2010 and achieved a record 132,200 handsets recycled in the year ending March 2011. Customers were offered an EGP 10 recharge card incentive for recycling old phones in Vodafone retail stores and dealers.

Waste is also generated from our network building and operation, and working with suppliers and local partners, we were able to recycle over 16 tons of e-waste (batteries) as well as over 100 tons of other hazardous waste from our sites in 2011.

Some of our other initiatives include our cooperation with Hurghada Environmental Protection and Conservation Association (HEPCA), supporting them to recycle more than 6 tons of waste per year from Makadi Bay, Suma Bay, and the surrounding areas.

Vodafone Egypt has also been recycling paper waste for many years, with paper recycling bins in all our offices as well as shredders, enabling all paper waste to be recycled.

Green energy & energy efficiency

As an environmentally aware business, Vodafone Egypt has set out to address global environmental issues that face our fragile eco-system. Becoming more energy efficient is one of the most vital aspects of increasing environmental sustainability and curbing the trend of climate change.

Using renewable energy is a key method of being more energy efficient, which is why Vodafone has taken measures to use the most abundant renewable energy source in Egypt - sunlight.

Vodafone Egypt started using solar energy to power remote and off grid sites in 2001, to help us improve our environmental performance and decrease our overall carbon emissions. In this regard we have achieved:

200 solar-powered sites located across Sinai, the North Coast, the Red Sea Coast, Marsa Alam, Edfu, and the Western Desert Oasis, up from 167 in 2011.

Eliminated the need for diesel generator sets in these sites, hence saving over 50,000 tons of carbon emissions and the surrounding terrain from fuel leakage.

Improved the lives of many people in isolated locations through uninterrupted operation on roads and remote areas, saving travel costs, improving safety on desert roads and keeping people in touch.

Vodafone Egypt has also implemented several initiatives in the network, offices and retail stores to improve energy efficiency. This is aligned with the Group commitment for Egypt to “reduce CO2 per network node by 20% against a 2010/11 baseline by March 2015 for emerging markets”.

The initiatives implemented on our network include using more efficient BTS or Single RANs (combined 2G & 3G) in new base stations and upgrades, increasing the room temperature setting so ACs switch on at higher temperatures, as well as implementing free cooling in 675 base station sites (March 2013). Free cooling uses fresh air to reduce the need for air conditioning. All these initiatives contributed to a 23% reduction in grid power consumption by the access network between 2009 and 2013.

Energy saving initiatives implemented in our offices resulted in a significant reduction in power consumption between 2011 & 2012. These initiatives included installing LED lighting inside our premises, motion sensors in meeting rooms, free cooling systems for our Head Quarter & Zahraa El Maadi building switch areas and new lower power consumption air conditioning units CCU for technical areas.